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All Rise...

Appellate Judge Jennifer Malkowski really wants there to be a tomorrow; she's planning to go mini-golfing.

The Charge

"A personal look at the death penalty in America."

Opening Statement

No Tomorrow is basically a talking head political documentary, filled
with interviews in which people speak convincingly against the death penalty.
Though that might sound tedious, in addition to the power of the interviews,
No Tomorrow has an interesting twist that makes it well worth a
viewing.

Facts of the Case

Directors Roger Weisberg and Vanessa Roth made a documentary, Aging
Out, in 2004 about young people transitioning out of the foster care system
into living on their own. One of their subjects, L.A. teen Risa Bejarano, had
done what few foster care kids are able to: she graduated high school and went
on to an excellent university with multiple scholarships. Ultimately, Risa
wasn't able to keep up with the pressure of her courses and independent
lifestyle, succumbing to drug use and eventually getting into a dangerous
situation that would end her life. Risa was murdered, allegedly by gang member
Juan Jose Chavez, who thought she would go to the police with information about
(other) murders he had committed.

Weisberg and Roth then found themselves in a morally difficult position: the
prosecutor in Chavez's case made significant use of Aging Out, showing it
to the jury to try to convince them that Chavez deserved the death penalty for
killing such a wonderful person. (Presumably) opposed to the death penalty and
uncomfortable with their film being used to pursue it for Chavez, Weisberg and
Roth decided to make No Tomorrow about the situation, using footage from
the trial (watch for a judge you might recognize) and lots of interviews with
folks ranging from Risa's foster mother to lawyers weighing in on the death
penalty debate.

The Evidence

A few years ago, I reviewed another political documentary about the death
penalty for DVD Verdict, The Execution
of Wanda Jean. This film asked you to think about the death penalty through
a very specific lens. It said, here is a human being. She seems like a warm and
kind person who has had a difficult life and truly regrets the murder she
committed; you probably like her as you get to know her through the film. Even
the mother of her victim has forgiven her and doesn't want her to be executed.
So, do you want her to be executed? For all but the most staunch eye-for-an-eye
types, the answer is probably no by the end of Wanda Jean, and the
directors hope you will take that "no" and extend it into a general
opposition to the death penalty.

The directors of No Tomorrow take on a much tougher challenge. Juan
Jose Chavez is no Wanda Jean, as the film offers no opportunities to really get
to know him (he isn't interviewed, but only seen in court) and his trial gives
us the sense that he is decidedly not remorseful. The warm and kind person here
is his alleged victim, Risa, whom we get to know intimately and whose
bullet-riddled body we see in photos from the morgue. It is to Weisberg and
Roth's credit that they rise to the challenge this case presents and manage to
craft a powerful anti-death-penalty film from it. While they may not be able to
convince us that Chavez is a good person, they mount a persuasive case that he
failed to become one in large part due to insufficient support from the very
government that now wants to execute him. They also argue, effectively, that
life in prison is a more appropriate punishment even for a "bad
person." The icing on this rhetorical cake is provided by some infuriating
statistics at the film's end about how hopelessly mired in a backlog of
executions the state of California is, and about the insane taxpayer expense of
housing a prisoner on death row rather than in a regular prison.

A wonderful collection of interviewees deserve much of the credit for this
success, collectively laying out the case against the death penalty from many
perspectives—legal, moral, financial—always with a strong sense of
the way social inequalities impact who ends up on death row as much as
individual guilt. As lawyer Aundre Herron puts it, "Those with capital
don't get punished. The death penalty is a punishment that is reserved for the
most disenfranchised, the most dispossessed, the most disadvantaged, the most
damaged. People are groomed for death row like the Kennedys are groomed for
congress."

Docurama puts out a nice DVD edition of the film. Its look and sound are
certainly not high-budget, but little flash is needed to make this kind of
interview-heavy issue documentary. There's your basic trailer and filmmaker bio
on the disc, but the main extra is a 30-minute excerpt from Aging Out
that shows us the portion of the film about Risa. It's painful to watch, given
our knowledge of how things turned out, but is a great supplement to No
Tomorrow. In fact, I would recommend starting with the Aging Out
excerpt and then watching the full No Tomorrow feature.

Closing Statement

Near the end of their film, when the directors' interviewees are discussing
the huge financial cost of the death penalty to the government, one asks us to
think of another possibility: "Imagine a system that took the hundreds of
millions of dollars we're spending on the death penalty and instead put that
into juvenile justice, instead took a kid at the first sign of trouble…and
got him into a world of opportunity, a world of education, a world of
rehabilitation, who transformed his life at that tender age." That's a
system you may yearn for—maybe even fight for—when you finish No
Tomorrow.